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Saturday, November 15, 2008

Counter-Strike: Source (commonly shortened to CS:S or simply CSS) is a PC Game developed by the Valve Corp. It is a complete remake of Counter-Strike using the Source engine. As in the original, Counter-Strike: Source pits a team of Counter-terrorists against a team of Terrorists in a series of rounds. Each round is won either by completing a mission (such as exploding a bomb or rescuing hostages) or by annihilating all members of the opposing team.

Game play

Counter-Strike: Source inherits features from both Half-Life 2, through the look and feel carried through textures and movement, and its predecessor, Counter-Strike 1.6, maintaining the game play style of its predecessor. The basic game play of two teams, terrorists and counter-terrorists, squaring off against each other in a series of rounds in which each team must either complete their objective or eliminate the opposition, has remained unchanged. The two most popular types of objectives are bombing and hostages. In competitive play, only maps with bombing objectives are used, since the AI of the hostages has not been improved over previous iterations, and is given to a number of problems. The weapon recoil has been changed since its predecessor, and is noticeably different from that known in Counter-Strike 1.6[1]. In addition, flash bang grenades have been visually altered to take advantage of the Source Engine, and are typically more powerful and efficient than in previous games.

Customization

Because of the large fan-base that Counter-Strike: Source has accumulated, there are a wide variety of different customizations and add-ons that can be used with the game. There is a large fanbase for the game that creates customized sounds, textures, weapon skins, and player skins. However, under the rules of Valve Anti-Cheat (VAC), models for objects within maps cannot be edited, so that a player using a different model other than the standard does not have an advantage over another person.

Maps

There are two types of maps available that come with the game, generally known by their prefix:

* de (demolition) * cs (hostage rescue)

These map types are created by Counter Strike: Source communities and do not come with the game. Some popular maps characters are:

Each type of map has its own goal. In de_ maps, it is the goal of the Terrorist team to successfully plant and set off the bomb, while the Counter-Terrorists seek to prevent the detonation of the bomb. In cs_ maps, there are a amount of hostages that the Counter-Terrorists must find and lead to the Hostage Rescue Zone. The Terrorists must then defeat the Counter-Terrorists to prevent hostage rescue. as_ maps, removed in Counter-Strike: Source, (although servers that use them still exist) featured one Counter-Terrorist who was a VIP (i.e. the target of the assassination), who had more armour than normal, but no weapons except the Counter-Terrorist starting pistol USP. The VIP must find their way to an escape zone, while the Terrorists try to kill the VIP. aim_ maps are those that are by and large all textured in development textures(generic grey, orange and measurement textures), with no objective. These maps are to enhance players speed in aiming, hence the prefix aim. Gungame gg_ is a server modification, where a user starts with a glock, at level 1, and works their way up until the last level (knife level) You Must get a kill with the gun your currently on that level with, or a knife kill on some variants of the mod (which steals a level from another player). Many variations of this arise. Reverse gungame is getting more and more popular, because you start off with the effective guns like the AWP, and the Para machine gun, and towards the end you get the glock, and grenade levels. zm_ Is another mod for some severs. The map starts off by both teams beginning in different areas. Most of the zombie mod maps that are main-stream now are ones like lila Panic, where there are several little rooms, with physical objects that can seal them off, And the zombies must pull the objects out, or find another ways in to infect the humans.

Counter-Strike: Source shipped with 9 maps of the cs_ and de_ types and have since freely published an additional 8 maps of the same types.[2] Maps are frequently made by players from the game, and the easy-to-access Valve Hammer Editor allows anybody to create their own. The number and types of custom maps (and custom map categories) for the game is forever rising.

Modifications

Like many different modern first-person shooter games, Counter-Strike: Source has been heavily "modded" by its developer community. Server-side gameplay customizations are typically implemented using Valve's Source SDK for Server Plugins, in the form of plug-ins. Server-side mods like SourceMod and EventScripts build on to the basic RCON commands as well as with the gameplay customizations.

The Quake Sound Pack is a favorite game sounds pack available with SourceMod. The sounds includes clips such as "First blood!" and "Holy shit!", and are all from Unreal Tournament 2003 (in spite of its name, "Quake" Sound Pack). The unique sounds from Quake are "Prepare to Fight!" and "Humiliation".

Unlike the normal game modes which are target based, Deathmatch (DM) games are exactly as the name indicates - the only destination for the players is to eliminate as many opposing players as possible, although defeated players "respawn" instantly, as opposed to at the start of a new round. Players of Deathmatch maps are given the choice of guns, and can exchange at any time.

Similarly to DM games, Gun Games (GG) are a adjustment to the normal gameplay format where each players goal is to advance through the levels of weapons by killing the opposite team. GG's can be played in a a DM style where instead of having to wait for the next round to commence to respawn, the player will restart playing instantly after death, adding to the pace of the game.

Skins/Models

The power to add new models and skins using the Valve SDK to Counter-Strike: Source allows for a large amount of customization. Skins (or textures) refers to the actual images applied to parts of the game — the player models, weapon models, and even maps themselves can be "reskinned" (or "retextured") by anybody. Models refers to the actual 3D-elements displayed on screen - VAC offers a server side variable to ensure only certain models and materials are used (enabled by the console command "sv_pure 1") intending to stop material based wallhacks etc. even so, not all servers use these limitations as they are optional.

Models can be changed either by the player by adding files to their cstrike folder, or by the server they are playing on using a server side plugin such as SourceMod. The difference is that if a player changes a model on their own machine, only that player will see the changes; However if the model is altered by a server-side plugin or tool, then the model that the player wearing is seen by everyone on that server at that time but the player can also edit those models also.

History

Counter-Strike: Source was initially published as a beta to members of the Valve Cyber Café Program on August 11, 2004. On August 18, 2004 the beta was released to owners of Counter-Strike: Condition Zero and those who had received a Half-Life 2 voucher bundled with some ATI Radeon video cards.

On October 11, 2006, Valve released an experimental update, Dynamic Weapons Pricing. Under this system, item prices are determined based on their demand the previous week. Even before the system was released there was vocal resistance from the community. Other updates, such as an enhanced radar system, have been generally accepted as a good enhancement.

Counter-Strike: Source has received by and large favorable reviews. On Metacritic, the game had an average score of 88 out of 100, based on 9 reviews, and a user rating of 9.2/10.While the game has been quite popular according to the Steam games statistics page, recently surpassing 1.6 in terms of number of players (http://www.steampowered.com/v/index.php?area=stats), it has not been widely reviewed, most probably because upon issue, it was packed with Half Life 2 at no extra charge.